Welcome back to Astrolabes and Ink. I am Rania Tarawneh, and this week we are in Cordoba, in the 980s, in the clinic of a surgeon called Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi. He wrote a medical encyclopaedia in thirty volumes, and the last volume is the one that changed the world. It is about surgery, and it is illustrated with around two hundred instruments, drawn so clearly that a modern surgeon can recognise most of them. Forceps, scalpels, bone saws, a syringe, and sutures made from animal gut that dissolve on their own. Translated into Latin, it stayed on European teaching desks for five hundred years. We go through the plates, we read some of his case notes, and we spend a few minutes on the advice he gave students about not operating when you are unsure. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.